For the second consecutive year, the eLearning Guild survey, which measures use of over 100 professionally-developed LMS products and excludes in-house created systems, shows that Moodle™ is ranked as the #1 LMS product among eLearning Guild members with over 24% of respondents selecting it as their primary LMS.
In the same data source, market share among eLearning Guild members for Blackboard™ was 17.5%. (See Figure 2.) In May 2008, Blackboard and Moodle were neck and neck for the dominant position among eLearning Guild members for their LMS product usage, each with about 20% of the responses. Blackboard recently purchased ANGEL Learning™, a small, privately-held LMS company funded in part by Indiana University, with a devoted following of several hundred clients, 25% of which are corporate customers. Although this purchase will increase Blackboard’s enterprise market share to 21.02%, it is still only a close second to Moodle among Guild members.
Figure 1 LMS market share trends.
Figure 2 Comparison of LMS product usage for the May 2007– 2008 vs. May 2008–2009 periods
As Figures 3 and 4 shows, even when excluding education respondents from the sample, Moodle and Blackboard are still the #1 and #2 ranked LMS brands among all eLearning Guild respondents.
Figure 3 LMS product usage, including education.
Figure 4 LMS product usage, excluding education.
When considering the use of LMS systems among customers, exclusive of K-12 or Higher Education, Moodle remains the top position, but Total LMS from SumTotal takes over the second position at 12.1% market share, with a slight edge of Blackboard now in the number three slot with 11.3% market share. Despite no clear market-share LMS leader across diverse corporate markets, pockets of preference are beginning to emerge. Of the 92 LMS products tracked by Brandon Hall Research (2009), we should continue to see acquisition, reduction, and mergers in the new economy. For learning professionals making a first time purchase or standardization decision, consider the very real possibility of certain smaller vendors going out of business, or of absorption by a competitor. It is important to have assurances about the possibility of staying on the product base of choice, and a contractual commitment from the vendor to support current software versions for a particular period into the future.
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